Thursday, June 16, 2016

EARLY EDITION. SPECIAL REPORT. Father of Orlando shooter part of U.S. pro-Taliban CIA/VOA network by Wayne Madsen ReportSeddique Mir Mateen, the presidential pretender of Afghanistan and father of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, is part of a pro-Taliban network of Afghan and Pakistani propagandists who use the television and radio networks funded by the CIA-influenced Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) to spread their messages to audiences throughout the world. Mateen hosts a television show called the Durand Jirga Show, which is funded through his Durand Jirga, Inc., a Florida not-for-profit corporation based in Port St. Lucie, Florida. Mateen's program is broadcast by Payame Afghan out of Los Angeles, which is also the home to a number of CIA- and VOA-subsidized satellite broadcasts in the Farsi language to Iran.

Mateen claims he maintains his own intelligence network, but this appears to be a reference to his CIA and Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) friends who are involved in South Asia's propaganda war using satellite programs broadcast in Pashto -- major languages of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Mateen's broadcast language Dari, and Urdu.

The BBG has funded a number of U.S.-based broadcasters that operate from the United States, Pakistan, and Afghanistan in order to target Pakistani and Afghan audiences in the United States and around the world with propaganda. For example, the Voice of America uses Pakistani television networks to broadcast VOA programs produced in Washington that involve anchors located in Washington and Pakistan. One Urdu-language program called "The Platform" airs on Pakistani television with an anchor in Washington and local hosts in Lahore and Islamabad. Another show is "Kahani Pakistani," a TV magazine program. These attempts at winning over the hearts and minds of the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan are considered major failures and a waste of taxpayers' funds.

Even after the 9/11 terrorist attack on the United States, the VOA's Pashto service gave a propaganda platform to the Afghan Taliban.

After the September 11 attack, Spozhmai Maiwandi, the director of the Voice of America's Pashtun service, jokingly nicknamed "Kandahar Rose" by her colleagues, aired favorable reports on the Taliban, including a controversial interview with Taliban leader Mullah Omar. It should not be surprising, therefore, that Seddique Mir Mateen's own views side with those of the Taliban. The presence of a number of pro-Taliban Afghan-Americans in the United States was facilitated by the CIA's support for the mujaheddin cause in the Afghan jihadist war with the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Even Afghan-American diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad, the former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, and the United Nations, served as a key interlocutor between the Taliban government of Afghanistan and the UNOCAL oil company in Houston in the late 1990s. Today, those links serve Khalilzad and the CIA well at the CIA-linked Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, where Khalilzad serves as a counselor.

Since Omar Mateen's massacre in Orlando, the VOA continues with its propaganda aimed against the United States. The following are just a few of the comments posted on Ashna TV's Dari and Pashto Service's webpage:

“I hope for a day when U.S. and Britain fall in the same level of blood and dust that Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are." - Feroz Sherzy.

Some 60 percent of the comments on the Ashna TV website praised Omar Mateen and his actions in Orlando. And the American taxpayers fund this activity through their financial support for the VOA and BBG. And, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton championed the expansion of these broadcast services. In 2011, Clinton testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee that her department needed additional funds for the propaganda war. She said,“During the Cold War we did a great job in getting America’s message out. After the Berlin Wall fell we said, ‘Okay, fine, enough of that, we are done,’ and unfortunately we are paying a big price for it . . .Our private media cannot fill that gap.”

The radical messages broadcast by Payame Afghan and Ashna TV are the results of Mrs. Clinton's efforts to expand U.S. propaganda broadcasting. For the CIA, keeping expatriates like Seddique Mir Mateen and his pro-Taliban colleagues at the VOA on the government dole is to ensure a ready supply of interlocutors and agents-of-influence is available to Langley should the Taliban, once again, take over control of Afghanistan.

BREAKING. EARLY EDITION. Orlando shooter's father has definite CIA links. The link between Orlando and Boston is spelled C-I-A by Wayne MadsenThere is one major commonality between the jihadist terrorist attacks on a gay nightclub in Orlando on June 13 and on the Boston Marathon in 2013 and that is the Central Intelligence Agency. Ever since the ill-conceived CIA-led war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the agency's incubation of the most violent extremes of Islam, the United States and other countries have faced constant "blowback" from U.S. support for jihadist terrorists. The older Boston Marathon bomber brother -- Tamerlan Tsarnaev -- and the Orlando club shooter Omar Mateen (aka Seddique Mateen) were investigated by the FBI on more than a single occasion.

The uncle of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Ruslan Tsarni (aka Tsarnaev) had been linked to the CIA. Tsarni was married to the daughter of Graham Fuller, one of the chief CIA architects of the radicalization of Muslims to act as radical foot soldiers for the United States, whether in Afghanistan against the Soviets or in the Caucasus against Russia. Mir Seddique, aka Mir Seddique Mateen, the father of Omar Mateen, is a self-styled leader of a government-in-exile of Afghanistan that is based in Port St. Lucie, Florida. The father's operation, using a Florida not-for-profit company called "The Durand Jirga, Inc." mirrors traditional CIA fronts in southern Florida existing for decades to overthrow governments from Cuba and Nicaragua to Venezuela and the Dominican Republic. Mir Seddique hosted a television program called the "Durand Jirga Show." The show is broadcast on the Afghan satellite network "Payam-e-Afghan," which is headquartered in Los Angeles and broadcasts in Pashto and Persian. Payam-e-Afghan's Facebook page indicates a link between the network and the Fethulleh Gulen organization's Rumi Awards. Gulen, a Turkish industrialist who lives in Pennsylvania and is an opponent of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been linked to the CIA.

Durand is a reference to the Durand Line, established by Sir Mortimer Durand, the foreign secretary of the British colonial government of India who drew the border between British India and Afghanistan. The Durand Line continues as the Pakistani-Afghan border where Pakistani-Afghan military clashes broke out simultaneous to Mateen's assault on the Orlando nightclub.

The Durand Jirga Show apparently appeals for donations, including foreign donations from the SWIFT network, via an account at Wells Fargo Bank.

The Tsarnaev brothers and Omar Mateen were followers of the Denver-born Anwar al-Awlaki, the Department of Defense's post-9/11 liaison to the Sunni Islamic community who even dined at the Pentagon. Al-Awlaki was killed in a CIA drone strike in Yemen in 2011 but his association with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agents was already well-established. Mir Seddique, the Dari-speaking would-be leader of Afghanistan, favors the Afghan Taliban and is opposed to past Afghan president Hamid Karzai and current president Ashraf Ghani and has called for their arrest by the Afghan National Army. Seddique's New York-born son, Omar, was 29 and it would appear that the Seddiques emigrated to the United States sometime around 1986, during the CIA's Afghan war against the Soviets and during a time that President Ronald Reagan considered the radical mujaheddin the "George Washingtons" of Afghanistan. The Seddiques moved from New York to Florida when Omar was a young boy.

Mateen was a security officer for G4S, a global security firm that has major security contracts for U.S. government agencies. G4S Americas is headquartered in Jupiter, Florida. G4S was formerly known as Wackenhut. G4S provides security for a number of U.S. nuclear power plants.

As with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, Omar Mateen's overseas travels were known to the FBI and CIA. Mateen traveled to Saudi Arabia in 2011 and 2012. Tsarnaev's travels to the restive Caucasus region of Russia were tipped off to the FBI by Russian law enforcement. Tamerlan traveled on passports issued by Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and the Republic of Georgia. The FBI had Mateen and Tsarnaev under initial investigations but later determined that neither posed a terrorist threat. The FBI has often backs down on investigating foreign terrorists when the CIA intercedes. There is evidence that this occurred with the FBI in the cases of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Mateen.

The FBI investigated a link between Mateen and Palestinian-American Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha who carried out a suicide bombing on behalf of Al Qaeda's Al Nusra Front ally in May 2014. Mateen and Salha attended the same mosque in Fort Pierce, Florida. The CIA's pro-Wahhabist director John Brennan has called Al Qaeda in Syria America's "ally" against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Brennan, while he was deputy national security adviser, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton encouraged foreign mercenaries, including Americans, to join the ranks of Syrian jihadists to overthrow Syrian President Bashar al Assad.

Mateen stated that he supported both Al Qaeda and ISIL (or Daesh as it is called in Arabic). Mateen's declaration puts to rest the argument of Brennan and his predecessor General David Petraeus that there is a difference between Syrian Al Qaeda, ISIL, and the Al Nusra Front. The FBI interviewed Mateen for his ties to the Nusra Front, which has received arms and training from the CIA and Israel.Tamerlan Tsarnaev became a "radicalized" Muslim while participating in a covert CIA program, run through the Republic of Georgia, to destabilize Russia's North Caucasus region.Russia's Izvestia is reporting that Tsarnaev attended training seminars in Tbilisi, Georgia run by the Caucasus Fund of Georgia, a group affiliated with the neo-conservative think tank, the Jamestown Foundation, between January and July 2012. Jamestown was founded by CIA director William Casey in the 1980s.FSB decided to contact the FBI about Tsarnaev's ties to terrorists in 2011. The first Russian request to the FBI came via the FBI's Legal Attache's office at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in March 2011. It took the FBI until June 2011 to conclude that Tamerlan posed no terrorist threat but it did add his name to the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, or TECS, which monitors financial information such as bank accounts held abroad and wire transfers. In September 2011, Russian authorities, once again, alerted the U.S. of their suspicions about Tamerlan. The second alert went to the CIA.At some point in time after the first Russian alert and either before or after the second, the CIA entered Tamerlan's name into the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list (TIDE), a database with more than 750,000 entries that is maintained by the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean, Virginia.

On May 22, 2013, Tamerlan's friend Ibragim Todashev, was shot to death in his Orlando apartment by FBI agent Aaron McFarlane. Todashev was being questioned by McFarlane and two Massachusetts State Troopers for Tamerlan's role in a triple murder in Massachusetts. Todashev, a Chechen, received political asylum in the United States in 2008 and became a permanent resident in March 2013. While Tamerlan Tsarnaev and Omar Mateen were given clean bills of health by the FBI, Todashev, who was reported by Russian intelligence to be free of any terrorism links, was executed by the FBI. What intelligence might have Todashev possessed about jihadist terror networks in Orlando? Could that intelligence have prevented the massacre three years later at the Orlando Pulse nightclub?

As with Tamerlan, the FBI had Mateen's name on a terrorist watch list in 2014. However, as is often the case when the FBI discovers a CIA-operated terrorist network, it is told to back off. The Tsarnaevs and Mateen show that the actual control organization for "Terrorism International" is the Central Intelligence Agency.

Modern Puerto Rico is a CIA creation by Wayne Madsen ReportLast week, in a decision that received very little attention, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6-2 decision that Puerto Rico, which enjoys a wide degree of autonomy as a "commonwealth" of the United States, nevertheless falls under the dictates of the U.S. federal government. Writing for the majority, Associate Justice Elena Kagan wrote, "Because the ultimate source of Puerto Rico's prosecutorial power is the federal government ... the Commonwealth and the United States are not separate sovereigns." Although the case heard was that dealing with the sale of firearms in Puerto Rico, the Supreme Court's decision. Kagan opined that the 1952 Commonwealth status bestowed on Puerto Rico does not "break the chain" between Puerto Rico and the U.S. federal government. Ultimately, Kagan wrote, Puerto Rico answers to the U.S. Congress. Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, the latter of Puerto Rican descent, dissented from the majority opinion.

Although the decision by the Supreme Court was met with disappointment among the supporters of Puerto Rican commonwealth status, for those who have championed independence for the island, the decision reinforced their belief that Puerto Rico is a colony of the United States in all but name. Recently-disclosed formerly classified Central Intelligence Agency documents provide strong evidence that Puerto Rico's commonwealth status was a contrivance conjured up by the CIA to ensure continued U.S. control of the territory.

National Security Council documents from 1970, classified CONFIDENTIAL-EYES ONLY, describe how two attorneys from the influential Washington law firm of Covington and Burling met with NSC official Viron Vaky on July 10, 1970, to discuss the issue of the island of Culebra, an island 17 miles east of Puerto Rico that was used by the U.S. Navy as a weapons testing range. The Covington and Burling lawyers -- Richard Copaken and Tom Jones -- were representing the residents of Culebra who wanted the Navy to cease using their island for target practice. The attorneys believed that National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon's counselor, Bryce Harlow, has hidden agendas for upholding the Navy's right to continue using Culebra as a weapons range. What the attorneys told Vaky reached right into the heart of Puerto Rico's quasi-colonialist regime, the same regime that Kagan and her five judicial colleagues legally upheld in their decision on June 9.

Copaken told Vaky that the situation in Puerto Rico had to be viewed in a historical context. He said that Puerto Rico's first Commonwealth Governor, Luis Munoz Marin, who helped destroy the Puerto Rican pro-independence Nationalist Party, developed the "commonwealth" contrivance so that Puerto Rico would serve the long-term interests of the United States.

The classified memorandum of Copaken's comments state that Munoz Marin's "principal lieutenants during his 15 odd years as governor were Roberto Sanchez and (fnu) [first name unknown] Negron [Senator Luis Negron Lopez of Munoz Marin's Popular Democratic Party]. Sanchez [who succeeded Munzoz Marin in 1965 as the second Commonwealth governor] spent most of his time in Washington in liaison with the USG [U.S. government]. Over time Sanchez became a close friend of Abe Fortas, who was the Commonwealth's attorney here." Fortas was a long-time political crony of Lyndon Johnson. Fortas was nominated by Johnson to the U.S. Supreme Court where he served from 1965 to 1969. Fortas resigned in disgrace amid an ethics investigation.

Copaken described Sanchez and Fortas as CIA operatives committed to keep Puerto Rico as a stable U.S. military and intelligence base. Copaken's revelations continued: "During the Dominican crisis [of 1965] CIA operated out of Puerto Rico and used Fortas' link with Sanchez to get Munoz Marin's acquiescence. The CIA agent in Puerto Rico was a Sacha Boldman or Goldman. This was the same agent who had channeled CIA assistance to a school in Costa Rica for Latin American political leaders."

The Covington and Burling attorney continued in his expose of Puerto Rican-CIA links: "Sanchez became governor in 1964. Personal scandal -- divorce and re-marriage to his secretary with whom he had been having an open affair -- affected his candidacy for reelection. Negron became a rival candidate and Munoz Marin advocated unity of the party behind Negron. However, Sanchez insisted on being a candidate, and both he and Negron became candidates for the 1968 election, thus splitting their party.

At this point, Sanchez obtained USG support through Fortas, CIA/AID/Navy aid was given to his campaign. There were disruptive actions directed against Negron. According to the theory, Negron's essential conservatism would have wrecked the Commonwealth and created severe problems; hence USG support for Sanchez.

When, however, it became evident that Sanchez could not defeat Negron, support was switched to Ferre [Luis Ferre of the New Progressive Party -- affiliate of the U.S. Republican Party] as the lesser of two evils. CIA/FBI and particularly US Navy support was given to Ferre, and he won. This gave the Navy a hold over Ferre."

Commonwealth status for Puerto Rico was crafted so the CIA could have an operational base in the Caribbean."Sacha Boldman or Goldman was actually Sacha Volman, who established the Institute of Political Education (IPE) in San Jose, Costa Rica in 1959. It was a collaborative effort between the CIA and social democratic political parties in Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela. CIA funds were laundered through the Kaplan Fund in New York and then the Institute for International Labor Research, a New York operation headed by perennial Socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas.

It has been the Commonwealth status that has led Puerto Rico into bankruptcy and made it vulnerable to the Wall Street vulture funds that prey on financially distressed countries, particularly those in Latin America like Argentina, Brazil, and Puerto Rico. The U.S. Congress is in the process of passing a bill that will address Puerto Rico's current $70 billion debt crisis. A federal government-appointed financial control board will likely enact socially-crippling austerity measures for the island. Following the Supreme Court's ruling limiting Puerto Rico's autonomy, the island will have little room to avoid severe budget cuts and "fire sale" disposal of commonwealth assets.

The appeals of the people of Culebra against the Navy's bombing of their island fell on deaf ears in San Juan and Washington as the NSC memo further details:

"Ferre, according to Copaken, contributed heavily to President Nixon's campaign and is on close personal terms with him. Given this fact, plus the Navy's hold, the Navy believes it will have its way on Culebra. The result is a surface duplicity, while they work out a deal underneath.

Ferre's family leases the only drydock facilities in San Juan from the US Navy; he has copper interests on the island. By cooperating with the US Navy he obtained USG support in a host of similar matters, or vice versa; his cooperation with the US Navy may have been secured by trading for things he wanted from the USG in other things.

Copagen [sic] alleged that there is close cooperation with the 'White House' certainly at the political level. Bryce Harlow went to Puerto Rico for July 4th celebrations, but one of the things he went down for was Culebra (precisely what Harlow was to do about Culebra, Copaken refused to say."

In the memo, Vaky says he told the attorneys he never heard about "the sinister picture they were painting" about Puerto Rico. Vaky also stated the National Security Council "had no operational responsibility in the matter."

Vaky passed the Culebra memo to Kissinger in a July 13, 1970, cover memo classified CONFIDENTIAL-EYES ONLY. Kissinger scribbled a note on the cover memo, which stated that the Covington and Burling lawyers believed that Harlow was "involved" in the Culebra matter.

Ironically, Kissinger was ensconced last week at the secretive Bilderberg conference in Dresden, Germany while the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a body blow to Puerto Rican sovereignty and the Congress hammered away at a plan that would bail out Puerto Rico in return for draconian financial measures. It is very likely that Puerto Rico's fate was on the table at Bilderberg and that Kissinger waxed on about how he once controlled the fate of Puerto Rico through the CIA, FBI, Navy, and Agency for International Development (AID).

Copaken later wrote a book about the Culebra incident, titled: "Target Culebra: How 743 Islanders Took on the Entire U.S. Navy and Won: An Insider's Account." The book was published in January 2009. Unfortunately, Copaken was never able to conduct a book tour to describe for audiences the U.S. government's control over Puerto Rico; he died from pancreatic cancer on December 8, 2008, a few weeks before the book was published.

Did the CIA murder Senator John Tower? by Wayne Madsen ReportAlthough they were both Republican politicians from Texas, Senator John Tower and President George H. W. Bush became bitter rivals. Documents discovered in the Central Intelligence Agency's archives point to Bush and his allies within the CIA being upset with Tower over his findings as the chairman of the Tower Commission, named to investigate the culprits behind the Iran-contra scandal. The information gleaned by Tower may have also resulted in his and his daughter's 1991 death in an airplane crash in Georgia.

In November 1986, President Reagan named Tower, who had declined to run for re-election in 1986, to chair the "President's Special Review Board" on the actions of the National Security Council and its staff during the Iran-contra affair. The Tower Commission, as it was known, discovered, as did Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, that Vice President George Bush was a central figure in the scandal. Bush ensured he had his own plant installed on the Tower Commission, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, who would hold the same office in the George H. W. Bush presidency. The third commission member was former Secretary of State Edmund Muskie.

In 1989, Bush nominated Tower to be his Secretary of Defense. However, the Senate rejected their former colleague in a 47-53 vote. The last Senate rejection of a Cabinet nominee was in 1959. It later became known that it was Bush, who, via articles and statements by the vitriolic conservative rabble rouser Paul Weyrich, leaked rumors of Tower's "womanizing" and problems with alcohol in order to publicly humiliate Tower. The bad press resulted in Tower's embarrassing rejection by the Senate. In other words, Bush set Tower up for a very public fall. It was retaliation for Tower's probing of Bush's central involvement in Iran-contra. And Tower's rejection opened the door for Dick Cheney to become Secretary of Defense.

On April 5, 1991, Tower and his daughter Marian, along with 21 others, died in the crash of Atlantic Southeast Airlines flight 2311 while it approached the Brunswick, Georgia airport. The crash was blamed on aircraft equipment failure. Tower and his daughter, who had just cooperated in the publishing of Tower's memoir, were collaborating on a second "tell-all" book about Iran-contra that was reportedly going to "name names" and Bush's name would have been prominently mentioned.Any further investigations of Bush and Iran-contra went down in flames on April 5, 1991 with Atlantic Southeast 2311 [left] and the plane that crashed the day before in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania [right].

CIA archival documents show that Tower cited as one of the major Iran-contra co-conspirators in the Tower Report, Graham Fuller, who was CIA director William Casey's top advisers and a friend of Tower Commission member Scowcroft. Fuller was a major architect of the CIA's training and arming Islamic jihadists to not only fight the Soviets in Afghanistan but in the USSR itself, especially in central Asia and the Caucasus, the latter called the "Second Afghanistan."

It was this policy of encouraging Islamist radicalization that ultimately led to the creation of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Fuller's daughter was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev, the uncle of accused Boston Marathon bombers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. As previously reported by WMR, Fuller, throughout the 1980s, Fuller was front and center during many of the acts of violence in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, from Lebanon and Syria to Iran, Libya, and Algeria, as well as Iraq, Afghanistan, and South Yemen. Among Fuller's fellow CIA provocateurs trying to stir up Muslims against the Russians was John Brennan, the current CIA director who continues the policy with CIA support of jihadist groups in Syria.

As a result of the Tower report, one of the first heads to roll at the CIA was Fuller, who resigned after the report's release in 1987. Bush and his sycophants at the CIA were livid over not only what Tower released in the report but also what he failed to include but knew about: that Bush was the central kingpin in the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran and the use of the profits to aid the contras. Bush swore out a vendetta against Tower, one that would culminate with a fiery plane crash in Georgia in 1991. Bush tried to escape blame by prodding a dementia-afflicted Reagan to fire White House chief of staff Donald Regan. Bush saw to it that Regan was blamed for the Iran-contra debacle. However, unlike Tower and his daughter, Regan did escape Bush's wrath with his life.

Not so lucky was Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz III, a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated Iran-contra and one of Tower's supporters in the confirmation vote for Secretary of Defense. On April 4, 1991, the day before Tower died in the plane crash in Georgia, Heinz was killed in a freakish mid-air crash of his plane with a helicopter outside of Philadelphia.